Back in February, up-and-coming British actor Oliver Jackson-Cohen (The Invisible Man) was asked by Entertainment Tonight about playing Marvel’s next big role Marc Spector aka Moon Knight. While not familiar with the character he was game for it.
JACKSON-COHEN: “I have heard this, yes. I don’t understand what a Moon Knight is. Sign me up!. No, I’d love to. Every single time I open Instagram, it’s like, ‘MOON KNIGHT!’ And I’m like, ‘This is so great and thank you, but I don’t know what it is!’. No one’s called me. I would love to be a Marvel superhero. That would be a dream. Tell all of your viewers to go and stand outside Marvel headquarters!”
Moon Knight is the next Marvel Studios series that will announce their main lead in the near future and is expected to shoot in the United Kingdom and the United States under the working title of Good Faith. The character would open the door to more of the occult, supernatural, and horror elements in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, not unlike Mahershala Ali’s upcoming Blade reboot.
The hero is ostensibly Marc Spector, a mercenary who has numerous after egos – cabbie Jake Lockley and millionaire playboy Steven Grant – in order to better fight the criminal underworld. But later he was established as being a conduit for the Egyptian moon god Khonshu. Most recently, he was a consultant who dresses in all-white and goes by the name Mr. Knight.
He’s now reaffirmed that desire to play Spector while speaking with Comic Book to promote his upcoming Netflix series Haunting of Bly Manor.
JACKSON-COHEN: “Listen, Twitter is quite the encyclopedia and I have been very fortunate that people have educated me well on Moon Knight and Marvel and the world of it. The honest response is that I have no idea, no one has called me about this, but, again, I stand by what I said, that Moon Knight sounds like a fascinating, fascinating character, and I’d love to get my hands on that, but you just never know, do you?”
The problem with actors voicing their desire to play a character publicly is that tend to be the kinds of actors that Marvel avoids. Most recent castings of Jonathan Majors as Kang The Conqueror, Tatiana Maslany as Jennifer Walters aka She-Hulk, and Iman Vellani as Kamala Khan aka Ms. Marvel have been people that were never part of the rumor mill and various fan campaigns on social media.
Also, there has been no shortage of random casting rumors/fan campaigns on the internet (take with a pinch of salt) for Marc Spector from Zac Efron, Daniel Radcliffe, Shia Labeouf, and even the increasingly busy Keanu Reeves. Some of the names would conflict with various casting and character information that had been making the rounds because there was talk that Marvel Studios wanted to hire a practicing Jewish actor but Efron (non-practicing and too busy) and Reeves (Christian and too busy) wouldn’t meet that criteria. There was also talk of Marvel looking at younger actors in their 30s, a little young given how much Spector has done before becoming Moon Knight and now that has jumped to actors 40-50. This could simply mean that this information is iffy, to begin with, which is why we shouldn’t take this stuff too seriously until there is an official announcement from trades/Marvel.
Earlier in the year, Daniel Radcliffe specifically debunked those rumblings that he was being pursued by Marvel for Moon Knight while speaking to Coming Soon.
RADCLIFFE: “I’m not averse to doing any kind of franchise thing in the future again, that could be fun. But the Moon Knight rumors are untrue, I can officially debunk that one, I haven’t heard anything about it.”
It does seem like that we’ll learn who is directing Moon Knight before we’ll get the announcement of the actor playing Marc Spector.
SOURCE: COMIC BOOK
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